


battalion

by jackdawblue



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Post-Games (Hunger Games), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-11
Updated: 2019-04-11
Packaged: 2020-01-11 17:45:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18429005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jackdawblue/pseuds/jackdawblue
Summary: Katniss comes home after the Games. At least, some of her.





	battalion

They line up like a battalion next to her mug. One black, black as coal. One the red of arterial blood and rebellion. One pink as cold winter sunrises. And one orange. Orange like his favourite colour, orange like sunsets.

Katniss downs the pills one by one in a mouthful of tea and a stomach full of acid. Every morning, she does this, this routine of plucking fingertips and reluctant lips. Gale once mentioned that she has the same expression every breakfast-time. He said that her mouth formed the same petulant, drowsy lines no matter what else was happening - if he were telling a story or if he were silent, if the sky was thick grey or jaundiced, sun-sick yellow.

She told him to stop looking at her mouth.

 

 

-

 

 

The doctors said that the pills would make her feel better. Gale says so, too, but she is angry with him and so doesn't listen when he tries to coax her into taking them. It's the same voice he used once on a skittish fox kit that they found, motherless, wandering in the woods. He crouched down to it and held a scrap of meat between his fingers, cooed until it came to him and he could pick it up, cradle it in the crook of his arm and warm it through with the heat of his blood.

She's not a fox kit and she knows that she'll swallow them regardless of what he says. She knows she has to. She even knows how many to take, despite having watched the bobbing of the silver buttons on the doctors' starched white coats instead of listening to them when they shook the pill packets at her. She'd asked Haymitch later how many times a day she should take the black ones.

Haymitch sighed. "Twice," he said. So she puts the coal-coated pill in her mouth twice a day, and the red ones thrice, and only one pink one but four orange ones to make up for it.

Sometimes she thinks that Gale hates the colours that rub off on her fingers if she toys with the pills before taking them. The pink makes her fingertips look swollen, numb with cold, as if she's just been pulling fish from his wicker traps. The black stains her skin with the illusion of coal dust.

This morning, she catches him watching her as she fiddles with the black pill. "What?"

"Nothing."

"Damn right," she says, even though she thinks that it's probably something. A lot of somethings. She pushes her chair out from the table. "See you later."

 

 

-

 

 

She comes home with a hunched shoulder and sore feet. The hunched shoulder is a reflex because she isn't carrying a brace of rabbits over it but her shoulder thinks that she should be. The sore feet are because today she walked five miles but she has barely walked the fifty metres across the courtyard to her mother's house since she came back from the hospital, after the rebellion was over and the new government was established.

Gale sees her limping into the house but doesn't comment because he knows. His muscles ache with memories, too. They try to lift things that he could once pick up one-handed but now can't shift with both because his muscles have wasted without mine work. His ears still strain for the intermittent hum of the electric fence around District 12, his hands still itching for the hunting knife that no longer hangs from his belt.

Katniss drops onto the sofa with all her outdoor clothes on and brings her knees up to her chest and stares at the arm of the sofa.

Gale looks at it, too. It's leather. The rebels had insisted that the Mockingjay be given fine living quarters but leather furniture is not Katniss. It is opulent and she is necessity. She runs her fingers along the seam of the cushion and stops, right in the middle.

Gale leaves the room but when he looks back in, an hour later, Katniss is still staring at the arm of the sofa, covered in the hide of a dead cow.

 

 

-

 

 

"What are you doing?"

"I'm going to see Haymitch."

"Why?"

She looks at him. "Why do I do anything?"

That shuts him up. His mouth makes a firm line across and it's satisfying. It's like a brook thawing its path through the snow in the spring. It feels like home except that she has annoyed him and dimly, somewhere deep in her gut, that feels wrong.

She ignores it.

She stows her hands deep in her coat and leaves the door open for Gale to close. She makes it two metres away from the porch before she turns and pulls the door closed. The _snick_  of the catch is comforting and stops the echo beating inside her head, of Gale's voice as he teased her, complained about his fingers freezing stiff with entrails from the half-gutted rabbit in his hands. _Born in a barn, were you? C'mon, Catnip, just close the door. The blood's thickening._

She turns left, walks two houses down and finds Haymitch's windows open. _Born in a barn, was he?_  He had asked for a house with the rest of the District 12 survivors, even though he was offered one in the Capitol when the rebels began to divide up the spare housing. He said that it was because he didn't belong in the Capitol, or in any of the other districts. She enters without knocking.

"Good morning, sweetheart," he says.

She spends a few minutes pulling her thoughts away from the mouse skull that she accidentally crushed on her way in. He watches her, fingers toying with the neck of a bottle. It's soft and gentle, and she wonders if he's ever loved anyone. It's harsh and it's violent, and she knows that those hands have murdered.

"You got something to say, sweetheart, or are you going to stand in my doorway all day?"

"What happens if you take more than two black pills, three red ones, one pink one and four orange ones in a day?"

Haymitch sets his bottle down. The liquid sways in its glassy embrace when he takes his fingers away. "Sweetheart, I wouldn't do that."

"Why not?" she demands. The pills, they drive her mad sometimes. They sit in their little pots on her bedroom windowsill, clear plastic jars letting them push their faces against the sides and jeer at her as she lies awake in the wee hours of the morning. The black ones turn into the faces of the men and women and children who died in the firebombed hospital. The red ones turn into the bloody scarlet holes that she shot in Marvel and Gloss. The pink pills are the sweet, tender colour of the insides of foxgloves, the ones that she used to stuff onto the ends of Gale's fingers to annoy him when they were younger and weren't thinking about how best to poison people with the toxin in the petals.

And the orange ones, God knows they are the worst. They speak with Peeta's voice in the darkness of three ante meridian when dreams are more potent than reality. The orange pills tell her with Peeta's words that she is broken and shattered and worthless. They tell her that she has killed more people than the revolution has saved. They tell her that there are a hundred, a thousand families who grieve as a result of her bow. They tell her, with poetic phrasing and boxers' punches, that she is a murderer, and she sits up in bed and screams her throat raw to try to drown them out.

Even Gale can't drown them out.

Even Gale's heartbeat, lub-dubbing like the beating of train wheels against tracks, the drumming of rain against tin roofs, cannot drown out the voices of the orange pills.

And she is so sick of them.

"People want you alive," Haymitch is saying. "God only knows why but some people like you."

"They don't live like this."

Haymitch uncrosses his legs and stands up. He is taller than her, even more so with her sore feet and hunched shoulder. "You survived an arena full of people who knew that the only way they would survive was by killing you. Twice. You survived firebombs and Peacekeepers and the Capitol's traps. And now you want to give up because of some stupid pills?"

"They weren't inside my head," Katniss whispers. She stares at Haymitch's grimy breastbone, visible through the drooping neckline of his shirt. "These pills are inside me. They talk to me. They tell me..."

"What do they tell you, Katniss?" Haymitch says. It will take her three days to realise that he used her name and not  _sweetheart._

"They tell me I'm a murderer," she whispers, "and that they're going to kill me."

 

 

-

 

 

"It smells."

"Sorry?" Gale swipes the razor over his chin.

"Something smells," Katniss repeats. She is swathed in bedclothes from one end to the other - she has taken the duvet from her double bed and wrapped herself in it. Only her bare feet and head stick out of the white warmth, a scar on the top of her left foot and dark hair spilling around her face. She looks pale, even with Seam genetics and their melanin. She looks washed-out this morning, wrung out by the rebellion and left to dry like yesterday's laundry. He wants to touch her, to smooth out the wrinkles in her soul before they reach the surface and make her old and worried and wizened.

He drags the razor up his jaw instead. "I'm making a cake."

"What?"

"I'm making a cake," he says, putting the razor down. He's finished shaving. "I thought it would be good to have something other than stew to eat."

"It smells bad," is all she says, but she runs the hot water tank dry when she takes a shower.

 

 

-

 

 

The next night, Katniss insists on cooking and nearly throws Gale out of the kitchen.

"I can cook," she snaps. "You don't need to mother me."

He does. She set two tea towels on fire last time she tried to cook. He sits on a rickety chair - brought from Katniss' room in District 13 and still dropping dust every time someone nudges its paintwork - in the corner and observes.

She misses two feathers on the bird's back when she plucks the grouse, and she slices into her knuckle when she cuts the vegetables. She swears at him and tells him to leave her alone as he rises, startled by the visceral red dripping down her finger.

He sits back on the chair, which drops grey dust onto the floor. Katniss rinses her finger under the tap before sweeping the vegetables into the saucepan. They sizzle dully. Gale watches. "You'll need some herbs in that."

"Shut up." She reaches for the salt anyway and sprinkles some in before chucking the grouse in - literally, the whole bird, in torn-up chunks that splash vegetables and water onto the stove - and stepping back. "Don't touch it for an hour. I'm going to have a shower."

Gale stirs it every five minutes while Katniss showers. She doesn't sing when she bathes any more and the house is silent save for the bubbling of the stew. He tastes it and puts some herbs in it.

When she comes back and serves it, she sniffs. "Did you put herbs in it?" He starts to answer and she holds up her hand. "Wait." She tastes it. "You asshole."

"It tastes better," he says.

"You're an asshole," she repeats. She leaves the room, taking the pills he laid out next to her bowl with her. He finds them in the sink when he goes to wash his face before bed and he sighs. She will wake up screaming twice tonight instead of once.

 

 

-

 

 

In the morning, in the grey light of day washed down with pills, she doesn't look at him. "I'm going out," she says.

He nods.

"Don't wait for me for lunch."

He doesn't. He knows that she could be five minutes or she could be hours. Her feet will hurt but she won't care. He hopes that she won't complain. He doesn't want to hear it. He is exhausted from waking up three times to her screams cleaving the night and his eyelids are drooping, heavy with waking hours. Tiredness weighs about the same on the eyelashes as coal dust, he has discovered, and nightmares weigh heavy on his bones as he sleeps, Katniss' screams echoing around the caverns of his femurs.

She has been gone three hours when he wakes, and he eats lunch alone.

 

 

-

 

 

"What are you doing?" she demands.

"Good afternoon, Katniss."

"Katniss?" she echoes. "Katniss?"

He shrugs, back turned. He's busying himself over something on the countertop. "That's your name, isn't it?"

She pauses. She tastes dandelion leaves and hunger on her lips, feels rough twine and smooth yew under her fingers.  _Catnip._ "Yeah. Yeah, it is."

He doesn't reply and she moves closer, wincing as her feet protest. She went walking again yesterday, turning in vast circles, watching the young crows learn to fly and wishing for snowfall so that the coldness in her liver would be justified. Her heart beat frozen and one of the crows, the smallest, screamed from above. "What are you doing, good-afternoon-Gale?"

His lips twitch as she peers over his shoulder. "Baking."

She recoils. "What?"

"I'm baking," he says. He doesn't look up and she stares at him, eyes boring holes in his cheek. She stares and stares, lost for words, until -

"If you think I'm going to pretend to fall for every boy who can put something in an oven, you're fucking stupid, Gale Hawthorne."

"I don't want you to pretend, Katniss," he spits, turning to face her. "I never wanted you to pretend. Do you know how much I meant it, that time that I kissed you before the Victory Tour? Do you have any idea what -"

"I've got some fucking ideas too," she yells. "I've got an idea that says that you think that -"

"That I think what? That I love you? That I want to help you? That I hate the fact that you are turning back into the shell of the person that I met years ago and called Catnip by mistake? Because you'd be right."

She turns and walks out of the room and sits in the hallway and cries. He can hear her and he slams the oven door on the macaroons.

 

 

-

 

 

The macaroons line up like a little battalion next to her mug. One black, black as coal. One the red of arterial blood and rebellion. One pink as cold winter sunrises. And one white. White, his favourite colour. White like snow and frost and clean book pages.

"Thank you," she whispers when she bites into the red one. It is soft and sweet and tastes like nuts and sugared woodlands. Gale watches, too stunned to reply, and this time, she doesn't tell him to stop looking at her mouth.

**Author's Note:**

> ✩ if you've enjoyed reading my work, please consider supporting me via [my ko-fi!](http://ko-fi.com/jackdawblue) ✩


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